Everyone is doing their first/top instances of things: games, albums, movies, books, songs. None of that is mine. So I'm doing my first ten plants.
#1: Fennel. Before I remember anything else I remember the smell of fennel, not the bulb kind but the weedy kind that grew out of cracks in the stairs and sidewalks outside the apartment building in LA. I have no visual memory of the plants, but that scent is now associated with sugar-coated fennel seeds from Indian restaurants and tall feathery plants in back alleys in Vancouver. I haven't established fennel here yet, but I've established sweet cicily which is a very different, perennial, licorice umbellifer.
#2: Mexican fan palm. I don't have many visual memories, especially not from when I lived in the states before I was six. I was surprised to be driving down to Palm Springs and have the skyline of palm silhouettes against an evening sky bring back body feelings, scents, and Dire Straits albums playing. I haven't interacted with these up close very often but there is a rightness and a fitness to seeing them on the horizon around me that I can't replicate in any other way. Some days I wish I remained in my birth ecosystem, so I could keep that feeling forever.
#3: Ruby ball cactus/Moon cactus. When I was very young, still in LA, mom took me to the corner store and told me I could have anything I wanted in the store for my birthday. I chose a grafted cactus, one of the ones with a green column and a pink orb on top. I don't remember what happened to that plant: I'm relatively sure it didn't cross the border when we moved to Canada. The overwhelming majority of houseplants that are sold die; their genetics live on through clones but the individuals are thrown out, neglected, or killed by folks who don't know enough about plants to keep anything alive. In elementary school I did a science fair project where I grafted cactus, probably in part inspired by that original one. Maybe I should get myself another one of these and put it in my hot window? They're such a unique entity, the top without ability to photosynthesize because it lacks chlorophyll but propagated by humans because it's beautiful, the column supporting both mechanically and supplying food to the ornamental top.
#4: Prune plum. When we came to Canada we stayed in my grandma's house in Vancouver. In the back yard there was a tree, suckering so really a lot of trees. I don't remember plums from it but I remember its presence. My family sieved soil for that garden and made a pathway out of the rocks. I know that happened but I don't remember it. I do remember the pathway was right beside this plum tree. Maybe it was the first plant I fully understood to propagate itself coming from roots underground? I saw how where it was damaged or where it had sun new shoots would form and reach upwards. I don't remember it ever having a conventional tree shape, it was just bigger than a bush. A condo was later built on that lot and I revisited a few years ago. The café on the next lot over has a clump of plums in the corner, probably the same plums, and I have seldom wanted to dig a plant up and bring it home as much as I wanted to bring a scion of that plum home. I don't remember ever having tasted the fruit and I don't remember the flowers, but none of that is the point.
#5: Spider plant. Again this is connected to my grandma, when we first came to Canada. She was a gardener and had both indoor and outdoor plants. I was too young to be a gardener then, and too much inside myself to understand that my connection to plants wasn't universal, that it had to be named to be seen. So I came to a place where someone kept plants indoors and when we moved I kept a baby from that spider plant. I kept track of scions of that plant until I had to give up indoor plants completely to go to school; I went to school to move up north and finally have a place to sink my literal roots. One lived on my mom's boat for awhile but is lost to me now. I still mourn the loss of that original scion from grandma's spider plant, though. When I think of it I can remember the way the inside of that house was dim and sepia-coloured. The first houseplant I bought myself in this new space was a spider plant but it was a curly one, not a straight-leafed one like grandma's. Maybe I'm hoping a piece related to that one will come back to me somehow.
#6: Violet. I'm not really sure why I'm crying as I write this. Maybe it's because the violet was the first plant that was really mine, that I got to live with in a way that didn't involve other people. Maybe it's because I remember that person who communed with plants and it's the one essential quality about myself that never did change. In any case, when we moved out of grandma's house in Canada and my parents moved into their own place that house had a little strip beside it, between the house and the fence, between the two houses. It was almost always in shade, dampish, and I remember brown soil there and the dried stalks of last years' plants. Violets grew there, and lunaria that you know as silver dollar plant. I read about how to make violet sugar, layering the flowers in white sugar like the Victorians did. I remember the scent, and especially the taste. They were purple violets. There in the shade I probably would have moved them around and tried seeding them, I would have watched how they grew and where.
#7: Lunaria. On the side of that first Vancouver house there were lunaria growing in with the violets. If you google them you'll instantly know which plant I mean: silver dollar plant. Lunaria, with seed stalks like moons. I remember sliding the papery outsides off the lunaria to reveal the seeds and to create those florist-perfect stalks. I remember learning about biennials that gather energy in the first year in support of flowering in the second, similar so far to my life strategy. I grew many of those from seed, placing the seeds, watching the seed leaves and then the true leaves and then the first year rosettes. We speak of growing plants "for" something: for food, for beauty, for health. The flower stalks of lunaria were beautiful but incidental to me then, as the food is to me now when I grow plants: figuring out what to do with any products is secondary and even detrimental to just being with the plant as it grows, supporting it, seeing how it occupies its world.
#8: Oak. I must have been about 7 when I was allowed to walk around the block from that house in Vancouver: our street I remember as bare, but the next street over was lined with oak trees. These weren't the little uniform columns that the city is planting nowadays: these oaks arched huge and high up over the street and rained down a bounty of acorns in the fall. I collected those acorns, brought them home in containers, watched the root split them open to come out of them and start a journey into the soil. There were so many many acorns that sprouted. If they could have all grown into trees it would take more than the city of Vancouver to hold them all. Even then I knew the oak was a culturally-enshrined tree, that it was magic in the british/western tradition and so it was magic to me then. Those trees are still happy living on that street. Every so often I visited them. I think about bringing one of the acorns up here to live, to see if it would survive the winter.
#9: Cherry. In the backyard of that Vancouver house was a cherry tree. It wasn't an ornamental one, the ones you think of that are slowly disappearing from the city and that were associated with a royal visit a hundred years ago. This, I think, was a food cherry. It was probably the first tree I really climbed, and certainly the first we built a fort in. It was huge for a city backyard tree, and gnarled as cherries are. They grow so fast, you see, and then when they're cut back they respond with more fast growth. A tree is a dead skeleton with a living skin, much like us, and when you cut into the wood deeply you're cutting into dead tissue that has no defenses. That's why trees, like this cherry that had been sawn back many many years ago, rot out from the heart. The outside skin kept growing, healthy, and sent out big limbs from that cut which left a nest where all the central branches came out from. You could barely tell the tree was hollow but ants lived inside it, coming and going through bits of a crack. It had aphids every year, probably why there were so many ants, and I remember the jelly consistency of the sap that oozed out of the tree. I remember cherry pits on the lawn, probably fallen after being eaten by birds. I don't remember cherries. In hindsight it makes me sad: we created this variety of tree, planted it, and abandoned it without good care in a backyard somewhere. When we domesticate a plant we usually reduce its ability to live on its own: I believe we then have a responsibility to care for it and not to abandon it to, if you like, nature.
#10: Tomato. I don't know what other people did with their childhoods. It sounds like you all were picked on in school? In grade 3 I moved from Vancouver to Mission, to a 5 acre lot on which my parents built a house. We had animals there, donkeys and horses and sometimes pigs and chickens. I pickaxed the subsoil that had been compacted by heavy equipment next to the house into some semblance of friability, wheelbarrowed manure up the long hill from the barn, and planted tomatoes.
I remember two ways of getting tomato plants: I definitely ordered the Stokes seed catalogue and pored over it in the winter, saving my allowance and asking mom to write a cheque so I could order by mail. Some of the seeds I received were pink, covered in pesticide or maybe it was to inhibit mold? I started them indoors, as I do today. I also remember, probably my dad, coming home with a whole bunch of gangly overgrown starts that had been on sale at the garden centre at the end of the season. I remember whole flats of those, and planting them everywhere. My tomatoes rocketed up: the house was two tall stories and I needed a ladder to keep fastening the tomato vines to the side of the house. I almost remember the variety, they were small salad tomatoes of a couple oz. They were such generous plants, and so they remain today: if you make them happy they will explode and produce so much.
I always grow tomatoes when I can: on the top deck in an Abbotsford apartment, with the neighbours calling from their decks: "oh yeah, 'tomatoes', will you share?"; in a greenhouse I built in the backyard of my first rental room where I lived without a partner, where my roommate's friend asked if I wanted a job working with plants because they were impressed by how I was trial-testing several varieties; now, in the north, where I need to learn everything from scratch again and cover my plants with buckets at night to protect them from the lingering frosts.
Yes. If I'm going to sum up my life in anything, plants are the way to do it.
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